Coronavirus vaccine: Expert warns that a usable Covid-19 vaccination won’t be available for at least a year – inews

NewsHealthProfessor Beate Kampmann said the situation looks positive for finding a vaccine, but it will be a long process

Friday, 20th March 2020, 7:45 pm

Questions over when a coronavirus vaccine will be ready are at the forefront of most people's minds, as the Covid-19 outbreak continues to spread across the world.

A usable vaccine will not likely be ready for at least a year if not 18 months, an expert confirmed, as the process is likely to be lengthy in order to ensure it is both safe and effective against the virus.

Beate Kampmann, a Professor of Paediatric Infection & Immunity, made the comments following news on Thursday that a US trial began testing on humans.

"This is a completely new virus and there's no new vaccine ready to go because we've not made one for this particular virus before," she said. But because we have seen other viruses within the same coronavirus family such as SARS (Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus) and MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus) - which were seen in the past decade vaccine developers can capitalise on some of the previous knowledge when developing a vaccine.

Positive signs

On the whole, the situation looks positive, she explained, as there are at least 35 companies and initiatives currently looking to develop a Covid-19 vaccine - meaning it is very likely there will be at least one option.

Prof Kampmann, also the director of the Vaccine Centre at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, explained that the US vaccine trial was the one furthest along currently but that it was quite unusual in that it had skipped the stage of testing in animals first.

Usually trials begin with testing on animals, but because this vaccine was likely deemed safe enough, it progressed from the lab to testing on humans straightaway. Unfortunately this does not necessarily mean it is closer to being used as there is still a series of stages before it reaches this point.

Stages of vaccine development

For any vaccine the first stage is called the pre-clinical stage, and is the development in a lab and testing on animals once something looks promising.

The next is known as clinical development, and means that the vaccine is administered initially to healthy adults - notably not people who have contracted the illness you're hoping the vaccine will work against. The reason for this, she explained, is that even if the vaccine was effective against the disease, if it leads to patients feeling extremely sick or experiencing horrible symptoms as a side-effect, no one will want to take it.

"This takes around 20 to 30 people," Prof Kampmann said. "Once the vaccine has passed this stage, also known as the safety gate, the next step is working out whether the vaccine will actually induce the antibody or immune response you predict will likely be the type that protects you against the real virus."

This is called stage two and involves a larger group of people and apart from safety also testing their blood samples. In this part of the trial, which takes several months to acquire all the results, patients' blood is tested before the vaccination and after the vaccination, including at various doses, to see how the body responds and pick the best dose.

The reason why it is predicted that a Covid-19 vaccine will only be available in over a years time is that even if one of the many candidates is successful in the early clinical phase and rushes to the next stage stage after a series of good results, it may fail a later stage and will not go further. This is why the timeframe to develop a vaccine can take so long as when one fail the process often starts again, and why several trials at early stages are a good thing right now.

"Lets say that there are several candidates that have gone to phase two as they've introduced the antibody response you wanted," Prof Kampmann said. "Now we need to test whether that vaccine actually prevents you from getting the disease because at the moment you've only been giving it to be people who don't have the disease.

"We call this an efficacy trial and that needs to enrol a large numbers of people to show that the vaccine can actually prevent the disease."

She explained that for this stage, a few thousand people are usually needed. Often a country where the outbreak is an issue is picked so that you can see the impacts of the vaccine effectively on the number of cases. If it gets to this stage and succeeds then we have a viable vaccine.

'Several options'

With so many trials underway, what happens if more than one vaccine works?

"If several look good, a decision might have to be made on which is going forward," she explained. "Issues such how easy it is to make the vaccine for millions of people and its availability and costs are considerations when choosing between more than one."

If there is an effective vaccine but maybe not for the whole world, decisions have to be made who should get it first - like health care workers for example as they are the most exposed to people with the illness and people who are likely to have particularly bad disease.

The other concern is where, and how consistently, the vaccine will be administered.

With coronavirus, even if we have a population that is mostly immune to it when the epidemic eventually dies down, there will always be newborns and people who did not get exposed, all of whom are not immune - meaning the vaccine would have to be given all the time, just like with measles or flu vaccine.

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Coronavirus vaccine: Expert warns that a usable Covid-19 vaccination won't be available for at least a year - inews